


Fair White Wings of Imagination as Bases of Profound Physical Inquiries

by Lyrstzha



Category: Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
Genre: Adventure, Alternate History, Always plan on rats, And yet more foonotes, Engineering, Footnotes, Gen, Geniuses, Historical, Humor, Mathematics, Steampunk, Victorian Science Fiction, Yuletide, Yuletide 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrstzha/pseuds/Lyrstzha
Summary: The Extinction Equation predicts our Dire Doom! Which is to say, the Empire doesn't make mathematical sense, according to the Engine. But surely the amazing powers of three geniuses can save us all!Wherein There is a Tragical Conclusion Marvelously Averted by the Powers of Science, With Interesting & Curious Anecdotes of Eccentric and Distinguished Characters Fully Illustrating a Variety of Instructive and Amusing Scenes as Performed Within and Without the Remarkable DIFFERENCE ENGINE.





	Fair White Wings of Imagination as Bases of Profound Physical Inquiries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [omphale23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/gifts).



> Footnotes are in mouseover and also at the end of the text just in case your browser or device does not support mouseover footnotes.

“Gracious!” Babbage exclaimed in the tone of someone who felt the need to exclaim something but could neither bring himself to stoop to anything less polite nor immediately conjure anything more specific to the situation. He blinked at the prodigious smoke in the room, which seemed to issue as much from the straining Compiler Organ as it did from the pipe Lovelace smoked furiously, and blotted his watering eyes with a handkerchief.

“It is nothing of the kind,” she snapped around the pipe stem between her teeth. “This is the very most ungracious calculation I have ever seen. It is positively chilling.”*1* She brandished a handful of printout at Babbage and shook it with a rustle.

“My dear Lovelace,” Babbage began in his most soothing voice, “we have successfully addressed mechanical issues before, and I'm certain that our combined powers of extraordinary intellect – ” 

“This is no mechanical issue,” she interrupted. “This is...” She paused gravely. “The Extinction Equation.”

Babbage blinked again. “Pardon?”

“The Extinction Equation,” she repeated, the capitals obvious in her voice and somehow seeming to echo a little. “You recall the problem we had last week? Directly after we received a note that gave us to understand that those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.”*2*

Babbage pinched the bridge of his nose with a pained sigh. “You mean for Her Majesty? About using the Engine to provide more practical assistance in combating the criminal element in the kingdom? I thought we agreed that was...a regrettable error in calculation best addressed by providing additional parameters.”

“So we did.” Lovelace nodded grimly. “And so it seemed.”

Babbage raised his brows in well-bred disbelief. “You don't mean to say that it is still...?” He trailed off delicately, glancing nervously over his shoulder. The Client _did_ have a somewhat unnerving habit of finding out about conversations to which she should not possibly have been privy, after all.

“Still saying that the British Empire is the world's largest Criminal Enterprise, and that its Queen is, in fact, the most dangerous criminal in this hemisphere?”*3* Lovelace finished, with no apparent sense of self-preservation or discretion at all, as Babbage winced in dismay*4*. “We have gone considerably beyond that, Babbage.”

He gaped at her for a moment. “There is no beyond that!” he finally sputtered. “I thought you were going to refine its definitions of criminal activity to address this problem before...” he shot a glance over his shoulder again. “Before awkward unpleasantness ensues,” he finished carefully, sounding rather as though the awkwardness, at least, already had.

“Which I have done,” Lovelace insisted. “For context, I have codified every scrap of information available on the nature and scope of past Empires, and rendered their rises and falls into function equations.”

“That sounds both exhaustive and exhausting. But very interesting. Did you base the slopes on common – ”

“Focus, Babbage!” Lovelace cried. “The results are what matter most now. After I fed in all the new parameters, indeed the Engine no longer identifies the imperial mission as criminal per se. Nor, you will be relieved to hear, labels the British Museum as a warehouse of stolen goods.”

“That _is_ a relief,” Babbage sighed with a smile, thinking of the social engagements in his future which would no longer be strained by such a label.

“Not so much as you'd think.” Lovelace stood abruptly and began to pace the room, smoke trailing behind her. “Aside from the minor inconvenience of overlooking vast swathes of the Criminal World by changing its definition of crime, I have stumbled into a much more serious crisis.”

“It isn't like you to belabor the point,” Babbage observed with a frown, growing rather more alarmed as he noted this.

Lovelace pulled up short and rounded on him, drawing herself to her full height in visible offense. “I am _trying_ ,” she bit out, “to go gently, so as not to give you too great a shock for your nerves.”*5*

Babbage drew himself up as well, mirroring her offense. “My nerves?” he demanded. “There is nothing whatsoever delicate about my nerves! I do not need coddling.”

Lovelace arched one eyebrow pointedly at this declaration. “Is that a street musician I hear outside?”

Babbage flinched, then regrouped as he heard no caterwauling coming from the street after all.*6* “That was dastardly and unfair,” he fumed, swelling in righteous outrage like the sail of a ship turned into the wind. “And it proves nothing about the state of my nerves or anything else, save the reprehensible plague that street musicians present to our city.”

Lovelace lifted both hands to stop him before the customary tirade on musicians could continue. “Pax. We have no time for this digression; I regret bringing the matter up.” 

This being as close as he knew she would come to an apology, Babbage sniffed, a bit mollified, and let the rant on his tongue fade away. “ _Why_ do we have no time?” he asked instead.

“I truly did mean to come upon it gently,” Lovelace answered with a sigh, “but perhaps there is no gentle way to say that we are facing the twilight of our empire, and eventually the extinction of humanity altogether – sooner rather than later, I'm afraid.”

“ _What?!_ ” Babbage cried, one hand clutching at his chest and the other at his mouth, as if to keep something from escaping.

“The math is immaculate,” Lovelace informed him mercilessly. “I have checked thrice.”

“Surely...” Babbage trailed off faintly, not quite sure what he was sure of. “There might be some flaw in the input variables,”*7* he began hopefully.

“No, it is all quite clear. Charting the trajectories of other Empires renders their cyclical nature quite plottable. Factors that precipitate their rises and their falls are regular enough to abstract a set of equations.” Lovelace seized a handful of punchcards from the table and brandished them at him. “I assure you, this is an accurate model of the rise and fall of the British Empire.*8* Accurate to within a hundred years or so, that is.”

Babbage regarded the punchcards grimly. “Well, we _did_ build the engine to assist us in just such Dire Need.” He paused thoughtfully. “Well. Mostly because it is a thing of Profound Beauty and Unparalleled Genius,” he added honestly. “But that doesn't mean it can't be of practical use in a crisis. In mathematical science, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries.” *9*

Lovelace nodded. “I had the same thought,” she agreed. “So I tried to extend the prediction further. I added yet more data into the Model about the increasing technological capabilities of rising modern Empires.”

“I have a horrifying premonition that you are about to explain the aforementioned human extinction,” Babbage muttered, dropping heavily into the nearest chair and beginning to wish fiercely for cup of tea. Where _was_ that dratted Minion?

“Just so.” Lovelace glanced at the Compiler Organ, which was still letting off a little smoke and the occasional _ping_ of cooling metal. “If Empires continue to operate with the same drives and goals, but with increased capacity for  Destruction....” she shook her head and looked back at Babbage gravely. “We are all eventually doomed in one of several possible gruesome ways.”

They mulled this over in mutual silence for a moment. Eventually, Lovelace ventured, “I don't see how we can possibly bring this to Our Own Dear Queen. Or to anyone who might breathe a word of it to her. Which is almost anyone, now that I think on it.”

“But the math is irrefutable,” Babbage objected immediately, in the tone of someone who was certain of a clinching argument, because Lovelace's math always was. 

“But _we_ are rather more assailable, and I expect at the very least that our funding would vanish. How would we support our real estate expansion needs alone?” 

Babbage frowned and regarded her as though she were speaking a language he had never learned. It was true that the Engine's increasing needs for space were rather expensive to keep up with, after all. “What do you suggest?”

Lovelace nodded. “That is my Conundrum at this precise moment. I have all evening been working on a Solution.”

Babbage leapt to his feet, energized by this news. “I imagine you have been working on extending the model to find that solution?”

“Of course,” Lovelace assured him. “But that is going to require immediate expansion. The calculations should be quite complex. We'll need Brunel as soon as possible. And possibly the deeds to every scrap of land in a mile radius.”

Babbage met this news with a brisk nod. “I'll send for him at once by zipline message.”

 

Releasing Isambard Kingdom Brunel onto a crisis was, Babbage reflected, rather like deploying a maddened seed ox*10* onto a battlefield. There was a reasonable chance he might gore an enemy, but one could never be sure he would not trample a few friends while he was about it. And there was absolutely no expecting discretion from him.

“What the devil is so pressing, Babbage?” Brunel thundered the moment he bounded through the door. “I was right in the middle of construction on an atmospheric railway*11*, and I have a horde of blasted rats to attend to.” He did not even pause before he rounded upon Minion, who was unlucky enough to still be holding the door he had opened for Brunel. “And you, man! You laze about behind the door like some layabout lick-spittle while working men falter for lack of sustenance!”*12* He seized the wide-eyed Minion by his collar and dragged him in close. “COFFEE, MAN! COFFEE! And be quick about it!”

Babbage, familiar enough with Brunel to be amply prepared for the feeling that he was being run over by a locomotive, was unfazed.*13* It was, at least, a pleasant development not to be literally run over by anything on this occasion. “We are in urgent need of your Skills; I fear the rats must wait for a less pressing occasion. We must expand the Engine immediately! I have drawn up the specifications of the building we will need to house the expansion.” Here Babbage gestured to a cogwheel upon which he had scratched some numbers and diagrams.*14*

“Your Engine again!” But Brunel snatched up the cogwheel anyway and squinted at it ferociously. “Of course I shall undertake this project, but I cannot see how it is more pressing than my rats. I built you an extension not three months ago. You cannot need more space so urgently as all that.”

“But indeed we do!” objected Babbage earnestly. “Lady Lovelace has employed the Engine to uncover the most shocking Calamity concerning all Humankind! We must bring every possible Formidable Power the Engine can summon to bear upon finding a Solution to our Dilemma before all is lost.” At some point during this impassioned entreaty, Babbage discovered that he had seized Brunel's coat-sleeve and begun to shake it vigorously, as a terrier might do to a mouse; he opened his fist and patted self-consciously but ineffectively at the resulting wrinkles in the fabric.

Brunel eyed him dubiously. “Calamity, you say? Look here, man, this doesn't involve poetry at all, does it?”

“I assure you, it involves nothing of the sort,” Babbage insisted. “It involves the very Future of our entire Race – namely, that we may _have_ none if we do not act soon.”

Brunel frowned. “Have no Race, or have no Future?”

“Either!” Babbage threw up his hands. “Both!” He found himself seizing Brunel's coat-sleeve again, and clasped the arm inside it emphatically instead. “I tell you, we are in the Direst Danger! Within two hundred years, we may all be dead!”

Brunel snorted. “We will all of a surety be dead by then, my friend. Unless that ridiculous Brown-Séquard Elixir*15* works as its creator claims,” he snickered.

Babbage threw up his hands again and waved them around for good measure. “Be serious, Brunel! I am saying that the whole of the Human Race will vanish from the Earth in the scant space of time it takes to establish a passably decent vineyard. The Extinction Equation prognosticates nothing but Destruction in our future.”

Brunel raised an eyebrow. “The Extinction Equation? Do you mean to tell me we will all be obliterated by mathematics?” He turned aside smoothly for a moment to snatch a cup of coffee proffered by a much-subdued Minion, drained it in one giant swig, and handed it back with a gesture for more.

“I am not expressing this well,” Babbage lamented. “Let me call upon my Fair Interpretress.” He leaned toward the speaking-horn set into the wall. “Lovelace!” he cried into it. “I need you to come and impress the seriousness of our situation upon Mr. Brunel.”

“Now?” came the tinny response. “I am quite in the middle of the Solution to our present Catastrophic Conundrum. I think I have the program we need, have we but the space and expanded capacity to run it.”

“But Lovelace, I don't believe Brunel is following my explanation at all,” Babbage complained.

“That might be because you haven't made one yet,” Brunel retorted. “Give over.” He stepped up to the speaking-horn. “Now, what's all this about an Extinction Equation, Lady Lovelace?”

“In brief, it is the mathematical prediction of the Fall of the British Empire, closely followed by the Fall of Humanity itself. This prediction is based upon my rendering the development and decline of civilizations into mathematical formulae which I have run through the Engine. Though the potential means of our demise are several in number, the fact of the demise itself is a mathematical probability – almost a certainty.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Brunel. He turned to Babbage urgently. “Why in Heaven's name didn't you say so at once?! I might have already begun construction by now. The future of our entire Race hangs in the balance!” 

“So I said!” Babbage argued. “But you _would_ babble on about tallywag juice instead.”

Brunel waved this aside impatiently and grasped Babbage by the shoulders to fix him with an intent gaze. “Never mind that now; there is serious work to be done in the service of an all mankind. If we must have heroes and wars whereinto make them, there is no war so brilliant as a war with the wrong, no hero so fit to be sung, as he who has gained the bloodless VICTORY of truth and mercy.”*16*

And with that he dashed out the door before Babbage could further voice his affront at being so unfairly castigated.

 

With the pull of a lever, the gears of the new expansion connected smoothly with the existing system. Brunel, Babbage, and Lovelace, perched on a high scaffold to monitor the integration, gave nearly identical whoops of triumph as the whole mechanism whirred and clanked industriously.

“At last!” Lovelace cried. “The final steps in the calculations may be completed, and not a moment too soon. Make haste to the Printer!”*17*

As they all pulled up short at the printer, Lovelace snatched up the emerging page. She scanned it anxiously, both Brunel and Babbage peering over her shoulders.

“Oh dear,” said Babbage faintly, after a moment.

“Damnation,” Brunel agreed feelingly.

“Of course!” Ada yelled instead. “I am only astonished this Solution did not occur to me. How obvious it seems now!”

“Obvious?!” sputtered Babbage. “How is building an outpost on the Moon to preserve humanity obvious?!”

“How else to solve the problems of overpopulation and war but to establish a New World? How else to preserve ourselves at a safe distance from the ever-more-powerful weapons of mass destruction predicted by the Engine?” Lovelace demanded. “Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the Unknown Worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then, with the Fair White Wings of Imagination, hope to soar further into the Unexplored amidst which we live!”*18* Ada exclaimed passionately, gaze far away and captivated by some unknown machine she was already envisioning.

“But see here,” Brunel objected, “We shall surely be lumped right in with the Great Moon Hoax.*19* We'll all be laughingstocks if we're lucky, and carted off to the madhouse if we are not.”

“Fear not!” Babbage assured him. “I have plans in place for just such an eventuality.*20* And surely the public must listen when we demonstrate the mathematics. And anyway, it isn't as if we're _Americans_.”

“There is that,” agreed Brunel. “And thank goodness for that mercy. But I still think we shall have rather more trouble demonstrating the mathematics convincingly than you seem to believe.”

But Lovelace flicked her hand dismissively, as if she were literally brushing away this concern like a nagging fly. “They will all see when we have perfected a Flying Machine,” she said, in a tone that was somehow both dreamy and sharp. “I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.*21* If we may make it go high enough...” she trailed off thoughtfully.

Brunel and Babbage both tilted their heads thoughtfully at this in perfect unison, like a pair of puppies from the same litter.

“Yes...yes, I see it,” Babbage mused. “With perhaps some form of shielding, in case of harsh weather or high winds, and a large compartment to carry the coal we would need to power such a long journey...perhaps pulled like a carriage behind it?” Babbage also began to gaze off into the distance, his tone taking on much the same quality as Lovelace's.

“I might adapt the principles of the atmospheric railway to construct a vacuum-tunnel, once we have made the first journey.*22* Then we need not worry about carrying the coal back and forth,” Brunel put in. 

“Gentlemen,” Ada said seriously. “For the good of all Humanity, we can, we must, we are going to the Moon! It will not be easy, but if we three unite our Creative Powers, we will yet secure Humanity's salvation by Science!”

“Hear, hear!” Babbage cheered, entirely swept up.

“And there are no flying rats to contend with!” Brunel added gleefully.

“Bats,” muttered Minion from his post beside the door in a tone that implied he might mean it in more than one sense, but none of them paid him the least mind.

Footnotes:  
1 I have chosen to underline some of Ada's dialogue instead of italicizing for emphasis as I do elsewhere in the text, because she had quite the tendency to do so in her letters. Mind you, Victorians on the whole found this a compelling habit, probably because it is difficult to italicize handwriting. I expect this also explains their fondness for copious, even wanton, capitalization – which I also employ throughout this text when it amuses me to do so.

2 The last part of Ada's dialogue here quoted from her notes upon the Analytical Engine.

3 In simple mathematics, the difference between empire and organized crime is, after all, merely one of scale. The addition and nature of the influence of ideological underpinnings is arguable, but in any case complicates the math considerably.

4 This is a bit of turnabout is fair play, if you ask me, as Babbage was the more likely of the pair to say something unwisely intemperate to officials, even considering Ada's mercurial temper. History attests to this most amusingly in the half an hour he spent yelling at Prime Minister Robert Peel in a meeting meant to pitch for funding for the Analytical Engine. Astonishingly, he did not get the funds.

5 In Ada's pursuit of mathematical genius and innovation, many wondered if her fragile female nerves could stand the strain of such intellectual rigor. After hearing such concerns all her life, I expect she developed a certain blend of sensitivity and annoyed impatience toward the subject of delicate nerves. Certainly the only quarrel history reveals between her and Babbage involved her refusal to accommodate his nerves by attaching an anti-government rant he wrote as preface to her “Translation and Notes on the Analytical Engine.” They made up before long, but the quarrel was briefly bitter. So I imagine her emerging from this experience, combined with the rest of her life, with mixed feelings about Babbage's nerves.

6 In later life, Babbage embarked upon a passionate campaign against public nuisances. For instance, he once counted all the broken panes of glass of a factory and, in true Babbage fashion, put his results into a statistical analysis table, which he published as “Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows.” Spoiler alert: he cited the most frequent cause to be "drunken men, women, or boys," so I suppose the drunken girls found more constructive things to do. He was even more opposed to street musicians, particularly organ-grinders. In his book _Passages from the Life of a Philosopher_ , he wrote “It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.” He followed this up with an anti-hoop-rolling campaign, absolutely solidifying the reputation he had in his later years of being the get-off-my-lawn type of cantankerous old coot.

7 Babbage would on no account consider that the Engine might be mistaken in its calculations. He designed it to stop operations altogether if an error was detected, after all. But he could concede that inputting the wrong variables might yield a wrong result. Babbage was frequently annoyed by questions about whether inputting the wrong numbers could yield the right answer, in fact; it was his least favorite question about the Difference Engine.

8 Using mathematical models to predict the rise and fall of civilizations would not occur in our universe until Peter Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut, pioneered “cliodynamics” with his research group in the late 1990s. But in the Pocket Universe, Ada Lovelace is all over that.

9 Babbage's last sentence here excerpted from his _Reflections on the Decline of Science in England_.

10 Interestingly, the word “bull” was considered naughty in Victorian England because it carried connotations of sexual potency. Polite people would say “top cow,” “cow brute,” “gentleman cow,”or “seed ox” instead. What else would you expect from a people who thought it best to cover the wooden legs of tables because they were too lewdly suggestive?

11 In both our universe and the Pocket Universe, Brunel adapted Clegg and Samuda's patented vacuum traction system to build a locomotive-less extension of the Great Western Railway southward from Exeter down to Plymouth. Unfortunately, in our universe the line was in operation for less than a year, due largely to the use of leather seals on the vacuum pipes. If the interaction of tannins and iron oxide weren't deteriorating the valves, rats were eating the tallow-lubricated leather. From this we may abstract one of the great lessons of civil engineering – or, indeed, any large scale human endeavor: always plan on rats. Brunel of the Pocket Universe has figured this out, though whether he can adequately combat the murine menace remains to be seen.

12 This is pretty representative of Brunel, I feel. While it is true that he was incredibly hardworking and driven himself, he expected everyone around him to be the same. Most of his best and most amusing rants consisted of him haranguing his workers to work harder or he'd come do their jobs for them. His heavy dependence on coffee was also quite well-documented. 

13 I feel it only fair to note at this juncture that many of Babbage's acquaintances would have described him in similar terms. His overwhelming energy and enthusiastic vigor were often noted by those in his social circle, and this is, after all, putting a charming, fond spin upon much the same qualities of character.

14 On one occasion, finding himself out of calling cards, Babbage pulled a metal gear from his pocket and scratched his name into it to leave instead. Babbage's handwriting was notoriously terrible, but imagine how much worse it would be scratched into metal!

15 I am tweaking the timeline just a few years here on the fundamental law of the Pocket Universe, which expresses Entertainment Value as equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard was a brilliant Mauritanian physiologist and neurologist who contributed much to our knowledge of blood heat, hormones, and the spinal cord. However, he was also an eccentric figure known for his claim to have “rejuvenated sexual prowess after subcutaneous injection of extracts of monkey testis.” Continuing his work in this vein, in 1856 he claimed that rejuvenation and prolonged human life were possible via hypodermic injection of a fluid prepared from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs. Other scientists sneeringly termed this fluid the Brown-Séquard Elixir.

16 This line is probably Brunel's most famous quote. I am fairly sure it's on a T-shirt somewhere, and I know for a fact it is on a motivational poster.

17 You are perhaps thinking that this sense of urgency is misplaced, because programs on the Engine could take considerably longer to run than those we are used to on modern computers. But that, of course, is in our universe. The vast size and complexity of the Engine in the Pocket Universe make it a lot faster.

18 This line is excerpted from Ada's letters.

19 The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 is a fantastic story. It was a series of six articles published in a New York newspaper purportedly written by an assistant of the famous British astronomer, Sir John Herschel, about lunar observations he had made on an African expedition. Because the expedition was real – in fact, Herschel could not immediately be reached for comment on the articles because he was still on that expedition – and the exhaustive, painstaking details about the project and the special design of the telescope used for observations were quite convincingly scientific, the public was initially inclined to believe the articles were real. But then each subsequent article became more sensational. By the time an article was describing beaches with sapphire-studded cliffs and bipedal beavers and unicorns, people began to get suspicious. By the final article, there were bat-winged humanoids who built temples, which really proved to be the final straw for most people. No definitive proof of who authored this hoax emerged, though it is generally believed to have been the work of reporter Richard Adams Locke, who admitted that he was responsible five years later. Amusingly, this hoax also sparked one of the most funny plagiarism accusations in history, as a furious Edgar Allen Poe insisted that the whole hoax was a rip off of one of his stories. In 1846, Poe would get even by writing a biographical sketch of Locke as part of his series “The Literati of New York City.” This whole kerfuffle being an American phenomenon naturally also explains Babbage's reaction.

20 He isn't kidding. As a student, Babbage joined the Extractors Club, which existed for the sole purpose of liberating its members from the madhouse, in the unfortunate event that any of them should be committed to one. I think this says a lot about Victorians.

21 This line also excerpted from Ada's letters. It comes from one of the best and most representative surviving anecdotes about Ada, in my opinion. At the age of 12, she decided she wanted to fly; she went about this project with the same methodical dedication she would display later in life. Her first step was to study the anatomy of birds to work out the proportion of wings to body, and to consider the properties of different materials for constructing the wings. She also considered what equipment she would need to build into the flying machine, such as a compass for aerial navigation. Ada decided to write a book, _Flyology_ , containing the findings of her studies and the illustrations she had made. Her final step was meant to be integrating steam power into her design. Alas, shortly thereafter she was left paralyzed by a bout of measles, and spent the next year on bedrest. By the time she could walk with crutches, two years later, her mind had moved on to other projects.

22 Why yes, that IS Brunel proposing a space elevator. Incidentally, this is not quite so anachronistic as you might think; in our universe, the space elevator was proposed only about 50 years later. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist who is considered one of the great pioneers of modern rocketry and astronautics, first published the idea of space elevators in 1895. Incidentally, he also advocated the vital importance of colonizing space, because he believed humans spreading across the Milky Way would lead to the perfection of the human race, including immortality and a carefree existence. But in the Pocket Universe, our heroes are all over that.


End file.
